White Paper: The Law

Over a three-month process a series of Public Drafting Meetings were hold in Utrecht, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Maastricht with committees composed of jurists, squatters, sans-papiers, academics, activists, and the general public work together to form “movement-perspective legislation”. These groups produced a collectively written convention as an instrument of law that acts both as a speculative space to imagine a more equitable future and as a concrete tool through which it can be realized. Each of the five meetings focused on a different aspect of the law and produced different amendments, with a sixth and final meeting on 23 May 2015 for revising the document. The topics were “The Legal Form”, “De-criminalizing the Subject”, “Right of Use”, “Modes of Re-imagining”, and “Vacant Property as Theft”.

White Paper: The Law is a project initiated by artist Adelita Husni-Bey in which I collaborated as a researcher. The project continued Casco‘s long-term research into questions on housing rights as with the television program Our Autonomous Life (2010–2012) and the long-term project Grand Domestic Revolution (2009–present).